(.net) technology and society

March 17, 2008

Top Ten Mashups for Social Change (Vote Now for Your Favorites!)

Mashups for social change? Apparently, you're not the only one that thinks this is a good idea. Last week, 122 project ideas were submitted to the annual NetSquaredMashup Challenge. This week, you (yes, you) get to choose which of these projects will get support.

Based on the contest's voting guidelines, I voted for projects that would
get the most bang for the buck out of combining mashed-up data,
exposing it intelligently to the public, and giving communities the
opportunity to leverage that information towards change. Many projects provided
interesting information, but didn't put a lever into the individual's
hand. Alternatively, other projects provided great depth of participation, but
not in a way that would scale to multiple communities.

Here are my picks for the top ten mashups for social change:

OpenCongress.org :: Track Congress with Social Data. New data mashups on “My OpenCongress” will allow users to customize the
stream of info they receive about their tracked items. In other words,
it can be a lot easier to separate the signal from the noise on Capitol
Hill-- to figure out what bills and votes are important or meaningful
to you. Users will have access to a wider variety of content, more
streams of helpfully-curated data about their interests, and more
social wisdom from around the web.

You Are Here. Punch in your zip
code. Immediately, you find out that your water is piped in from a
steadily dwindling aquifer in another state, that your garbage is being
carted off to an incinerator in the the poorest part of your city. You
see pictures of these places, discover their proximity on maps, see
related statistics and individual comparisons about resource use and waste production. And something makes you mad--maybe the incinerator is a stonesthrow
from your daughter's school. Good news: you don't
have to seethe behind your computer, alone with your outrage until you
get distracted by the next shiny thing on the net. With a couple of
clicks, connect to
organizations working on just these issues—suddenly you're linked up
with a group working to create a city composting program or a
water-conservation organization.

KnowMore.org Firefox Extension - Get Alerts of Corporate Abuses When You Visit Company/Brand/Product Websites. A Firefox extension that will alert users to corporate crimes whenever
they visit company and brand websites. This way, when you visit a
company or brand's website that is in the KnowMore directory, the
KnowMore extension will automatically display the relevant issues and
ratings within your browser. For example, if you were to visit AmericanApparel.net, the statement - "This company has areas of concern around worker's rights and business ethics. Click HERE to Learn More!” would appear over the top of that website.

MAPLight.org: Mapping Money and Politics. Anyone can create, view, and share maps of contributions from the oil
industry, labor unions, or any other interest influencing government.
You can compare candidates, to see who has the most local support and
whose financial support comes from out-of-state. You can even display
income, ethnic, and other demographic information

City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery.
Think New Orleans will provide a citizen driven tool for the notification of demolitions.
Not only that, it will provide an interactive map of the recovery: Permit overlay – Citizens will be able to view the pace of
construction and the nature of construction with an overlay of city
building permits. City demolition overlay – We wrestle with the city to get an
accurate list of the houses they intend to demolish. When we do, we
will add that information as an overlay to the mashup. Permit and demolition notification – Neighborhood groups are the
driving force of New Orleans’ recovery. We want to provide them with a
notification tool, that will allow them to get daily updates on who’s
rebuilding, who’s coming back. Incentive Eligable Inventory – As further tax incentives for
restoration become available, the map will outline the historic
districts and map the eligible housing inventory.

Mapping the Hunger Gap. People will use the Google Mashup to look at the data in communities
relative to how much need there is for food, and how many hungry people
there are. When they zoom into a city, or a census tract, they will get
a picture of how many people in that area are suffering from hunger
insecurity. (Sponsored by Second Harvest Food Bank.)

Volunteer Now! - by mobile phone. Tap into the massive untapped capacity to do good by merging human location data with volunteer opportunity data. Spontaneously volunteer your labor or expertise by connecting to volunteer
opportunities in your immediate vicinity – or to organizations that can
use your expertise over the phone. A scenario: You’ve just missed your airplane and have 6 hours to
kill at the Philadelphia airport. You click the “Volunteer Now!” button
on your mobile phone and tell it how much time you have. You decide that it’s too much effort to go somewhere to volunteer in person, so you select an organization that needs your expert help reviewing a contract.

CorpWatch - Government Data on Corporations. By adapting visualization software such as Prefuse
into a Drupal module, a large database of unwieldy government
information can be made accessible and intuitive for activists and
citizens to interact with. The visualization would illustrate the relationships of who-owns-who
in the global corporate landscape and shed light on the often dizzying
maze of shell companies used to displace liability and avoid corporate
accountability.

Change Broadcasting Channels. CBC (Change Broadcasting Channels) allows users to select channels of
social change, and receive instant news about these channels on a
mobile phone through SMS or twitter. Every channel has a community of
subscribers that use the community tools to promote and share big
stories and events.

Live Climate. LiveClimate.org is a retail website that links greenhouse gas offset
projects in low-income countries, with buyers who value the social and
environmental co-benefits of their carbon offsets. The Live Climate
retail channel directly connects the offset buyer with the project in a
developing country that generated the offset. Vivid descriptions of the
community, and people affected by each project and clear descriptions
of the social co-benefits inform customers as they select an offset
project to buy from. A mashup of maps and project information would
allow customers to see where they will make an impact. Customers can
get ongoing information about the projects they support through RSS
feeds and continuing pictures.

Here's some more info on the event from the Yahoo! Developer Network:

The polls opened this morning, and will remain open until this Friday at 5PM Pacific time. NetSquared has asked that you keep these contest objectives in mind as you're picking favorites:

Does the Mashup use the power of community and social networks to create change?

Is there a clear way to measure the success of the application; does
this measurement directly relate to creating social impact?

Does the application give you a sense that the project exhibits passion and commitment to work for social change?

Voters may vote for up to ten projects that they find interesting.
Head over to NetSquared and vote! Come on back here to talk about your choices.

Comments

Top Ten Mashups for Social Change (Vote Now for Your Favorites!)

Mashups for social change? Apparently, you're not the only one that thinks this is a good idea. Last week, 122 project ideas were submitted to the annual NetSquaredMashup Challenge. This week, you (yes, you) get to choose which of these projects will get support.